The Joy of Discipline

I love Christmas cards.  Perhaps that is silly, but I get a real thrill out of seeing how families have grown or changed and reading through their musings on all the year has brought and taught.  I’m starting to get them from friends my own age now... and that was a bit unnerving at first, but getting to read all about the wonderful things they are doing and experiencing has been a great joy and blessing.  One I got after the new year  from a sister living in LA and she ended it with a link to a sermon from the church I attended regularly in my last year at SC called Reality LA and it addressed the topic of spiritual disciplines.  When I finally got around to listening to it (two weeks after I pulled it up--feel free to note the irony here), I got an incredible gift.  Several, in fact, that I want to share :D.

The first came in the form of a warning against replacing a focus on Jesus with a focus on community.  I had never really thought about that being a pitfall before and then Tim continued: “someone asks you to look at your spiritual life and you think, ‘i’m ok, I go to church, I go to small group, I have a bunch of Christian friends...’ but when you are alone, you don’t read, you don’t pray, you don’t commune with God... your faith is corporate, not personal.”  

Well that got me thinking.  There are beautiful and important things that come from a Christian community, but the problem with it is that it is meant to encourage an individual faith and if that individual faith is being neglected, community can become an idol instead of a support.  On the other hand, distancing oneself from community has its own list of pitfalls, chief among them being the reorientation on self rather than Jesus.  

The thing that really struck me in all this was list of “don’ts” that indicated a lack of personal faith.  Being on break and out of the normal pattern of life had been restful, but I had to face the fact that reading, praying, and especially communing had all taken a pretty significant back seat for me since December.  And the fruit of that was evident.  I was grouchy and antsy and impatient.  I reverted to the avoidance practice I perfected last year, getting lost in a TV show--seriously, Netflix instant play is dangerous for me.  God felt distant, I had no perspective... I didn’t realize how much or what was affecting me until I saw the contrast.  “What you invest in, there will your heart follow.”  I didn’t like where my heart was following.  

The next gift was better :) --a gem of efficiency and practicality: If you have a goal, you fix your eyes on it and attend to the things necessary to achieve your goal:

Goal=focus on Jesus

-train yourself for godliness (1Tim 4:7)

Here followed four private spiritual disciplines which, while not new, were still really good reminders:

1. Study: devoting time and attention to something to gain knowledge.  When I study the Word-- really study, not just check the ‘I read today’ box-- I am simultaneously filled with peace and with energy because it nourishes my soul!  Ps 1:1-3  God is the creator and source of life.  We were created to share intimacy with Him and we faint for lack of proper nourishment when we shun access to Him through His Word.
2. Prayer: to be in communion with God-- pouring out our hearts to God and listening to His voice.  Praying is hard when I’m not really steeped in God.  The second I enter into the presence of God, everything is laid bare and there is usually something I don’t want God to see... as Tim said, “the masks come off (whether you want them to or not) so you might as well confess it and claim the forgiveness that God has already provided.”  Praying with openness and honesty is refreshing (and so much easier!).
3. Solitude: allows you to fine-tune your hearing from God by removing distraction.  This  means more than just getting away from people.  For me it means getting away from devices as well.  My ipod died this summer and I’ve really seen a lot of good come from my separation from the constant stream of noise (some of it very lovely noise!) it provided.  The key here is distancing from distractions of all kinds.  Jeez we have a lot of them!
4. Service: acts that benefit others, but that no one will see or reward.  

And now, the all important question, for which I am famous (or infamous) at school, why?  Why do we practice spiritual disciplines?

Three reasons:

1. To enjoy God!  These disciplines provide a framework within which to revel in God’s presence, to understand more of His character and His plans, to get refreshed with something wholly good and pure!  It’s not about earning favor, but about enjoying the favor He has already given us!
2. To improve spiritual health.  If we are filled with good, holy, honest, and true things, we no longer exude jealousy or envy or bitterness, but joy and peace and love because we are no longer rotting from the inside...we’re connected to our life source!
3. To be a sweet fragrance of Christ to others.  Nothing is more inviting than meeting someone who is completely secure in and energized by God.  I’ve been blessed to live with several such girls and can speak from experience that it is the most authentic witness available to experience.  

When they are all laid out like this, it is hard for me to deny how worth-while it is to pursue study and prayer and solitude and service.  If it were easy, though, Jesus wouldn’t have to tell us to do them.  We are all trained by our sinful natures from childhood, but we are called to re-train ourselves in the likeness of Christ.  Just as the first bread of the first passover had leaven in it that was not allowed to rise, we are called to keep our proclivity towards sin from rising.  It doesn’t seem to get any easier as time goes on, but it does seem more and more worth it!

I’ll leave you with something I just read today, Dallas Willard quoting C.S. Lewis: “ Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and trying to carry it out.  Rather, the real Son of God is at your side.  He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself.  He is beginning, so to speak, to inject His kind of life and thought... into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man.  The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”  :)